MIAMI - Florida is the Ground Zero of
the US presidential election in November, according to
Republican Machiavelli Karl Rove. Whoever wins Florida
wins the presidency, just like in 2000 - but not with
hanging chads this time, it's hoped.
Ground Zero
in Florida has to be Versailles: not a replica of the
French chateau, rather a Cuban restaurant in the famous
Calle Ocho (8th Street) of Miami's Little Havana, close
to the stupendously named Virgen Milagrosa (Miraculous
Virgin) supermarket and an avalanche of stickers
promoting Love for Mayor (not a declaration of love, but
support for the also stupendously named Jay Love in his
campaign for mayor of Miami-Dade County, running against
the more Hispanic Jimmy Morales).
All the big
shots have made their pilgrimage to Versailles: Bush Sr
and Jr, Bill Clinton, an array of Democrats. John Kerry,
if he harbors any expectation of winning Florida, must
urgently hit a mojito, order a picadillo a cubana
and hold an impromptu town meeting on site: what was the
Latin Quarter at the end of the 19th century, and later
clustered around the Tower cinema in Little Havana, is
now a full-fledged Central American city, with all kinds
of services catering to immigrants not only from Cuba
but from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and the
Dominican Republic.
Versailles is undiluted
Cuban-American central casting. One finds everything
from Bay of Pigs veterans and aged clones of Tony
Montana in Brian de Palma's 1980s cocaine epic
Scarface to young Central Americans starting a
new life and whole families parading their new SUV with
sunroof and DVD. Everybody seems to sport an
I've-made-it-in-America smile. When Christopher Columbus
discovered America via the Caribbean, he apparently
asked himself if he had not stumbled upon the Garden of
Eden - instead of India. That's understandable. In the
name of God, money or Marx, Spanish
conquistadores, Yankee capitalists and El
Comandante Fidel Castro have tried to mold Cuba to their
dreams. Seems like geography has resisted against
history: if Cuba remains a paradisiac place, Cubans
everywhere resemble the Children of Paradise.
Cuban-Americans, in their beautiful, melodic,
salsa-tinged Spanish intonations, joke that "the enemy",
Fidel, has nightmares about Versailles. But the fact is
El Comandante is still there. This crucial 8 percent of
the Florida electorate tends to vote en bloc: 82
percent did so in 2000 for George W Bush. And their
priority is obvious: to get rid of Fidel. Just to
pronounce these dreaded five letters is enough to
release the Furies from the bowels of many a
Cuban-American.
El Comandante
raps Bush got his votes in 2000 in essence
because of tireless campaigning by brother Jeb, the
governor of Florida. Now, the Bush administration has
finally launched its own public relations blitz to
promote what nobody since John F Kennedy has managed to
concoct: its own mojito - two-thirds ideology, one-third
political opportunism - to "expedite the ending of the
dictatorship in Cuba", according to the State
Department. A Cuban-American, Mel Martinez, presides
over the Bush-appointed Commission for Assistance to
Cuba Libre (Free Cuba) alongside Secretary Colin Powell.
The Bush administration has already imposed restrictions
to slow the flow of remittances by Cuban-Americans and
has restricted travel to Cuba to only once every three
years. This means that Cuban-Americans themselves now
have to wait an eternity to see their relatives still
living on the island, and vice-versa.
Peter
Kornbluh, who follows Cuba closely at the National
Security Archive, says the Bush program is "an Operation
Mongoose without the CIA covert sabotage and
assassination efforts". It involves, for instance, wacky
propaganda claims, such as Cuba having the capacity to
produce biological weapons. Silvia Wilhelm, director of
Puentes Cubanos, a non-profit organization in Miami,
says the restrictions on remittances and travel will
only hurt the average Cuban, not the Fidel regime. Even
Cuba's leading dissidents are saying Cubans have to
organize the post-Fidel era, not Washington.
Is
Fidel losing any sleep? Not a wink. He denounced the
Bush program in front of a million people in Havana on
May 1, International Workers Day. His verve is intact:
"You are attacking Cuba for petty, political reasons,
trying to obtain electoral support from a shrinking
group of renegades and mercenaries who have no ethical
principles whatsoever. You lack the moral right to speak
of terrorism because you are surrounded by a bunch of
murderers who have caused the death of thousands of
Cubans through terrorist methods."
El Comandante
is defiant: "This people can be exterminated - it's as
well you know this - or wiped off the face of the Earth,
but it cannot be subjugated nor put once again into the
humiliating position of a United States neo-colony." El
Comandante is an acute observer of US political life:
"The only thing you know about Cuba are the lies that
spill forth from the ravenous mouths of the corrupt and
insatiable mob of former [president Fulgencio] Batista
supporters and their descendents who are experts in
electoral fraud and capable of electing president of the
United States someone who did not obtain enough votes to
claim victory." And El Comandante always keeps his sense
of humor: "Since you have decided that the die is cast,
I have the pleasure of saying farewell like the Roman
gladiators who were about to fight in the arena: Hail
Caesar, those who are about to die salute you!"
So Fidel is not losing any sleep, as he has not
lost any sleep over the 40-year-old, thick-as-a-brick,
Kennedy-imposed trade embargo. Many Cuban-Americans are
also having second thoughts. Joe Garcia, executive
director of the Cuban American National Foundation,
believes the embargo is "sort of a moral position, but
the freedom of Cuba is what matters". The embargo is
like the Tablets of Moses: it will only go when Fidel
goes. But Garcia would have liked the Bushies to do more
for Cuban civil society - as they promised. Other
businessmen are also considering the possibility of the
end of the embargo, but only under strict controls so
Fidel's regime - supposed to be dynastic (brother Raul
is next in line) won't benefit.
Felipe Valls,
Versailles's owner, hurrying to catch a flight to Spain,
expresses the majority view: he will vote for Bush. For
powerful Cuban-Americans, Kerry is considered "soft" on
Fidel and a flip-flopper to boot - one more proof that
Karl Rove spinning really sticks. Some of these powerful
Cuban-Americans live not far from Little Havana, in
fabulous mansions in Coral Gables, and are members of
the Republican Business Advisory Council. But nothing
can be taken for granted. Both Bush and Kerry have to
prepare. When they drop by Versailles in the near future
to order their rice and beans and then wash it all down
with the Sugarcane Express that is a Cuban cup of
coffee, they will both face the same question: What are
they really going to do about Cuba, and how fast?
Diplomats tell Asia Times Online that Cubans who
did not or could not leave the island now regard Fidel
with a sort of bitter sympathy: they've been through so
much together before arriving at the current impasse.
It's like the feeling in Spain during the last years of
the Francisco Franco era. By the way, both the Franco
and Castro families come from the same region in Spain.
They got on very well. Maybe that's the secret of a
dictatorship: if you stay in power for a generation, and
if you do not kill a lot of people in the last stretch,
your superhuman iron will and good luck will compensate
in the public eye for all your mistakes, your crimes and
all the mess you created. The future of Cuba does not
depend on Fidel. Cubans are just waiting for him to die.
But in a US presidential election, 40 years on, he's
still a huge player.
Florida
flip-flopping So what is Kerry doing about all
this? Progressive Democrats are terribly worried. In the
past few months, Kerry has all but endorsed the Tony
Montana-style, anti-Fidel paranoia of some powerful
Cuban-Americans, not to mention the ramblings of
ultra-wealthy expatriates from Venezuela also living in
fabulous mansions in Coral Gables. Kerry has been
sounding exactly like the two key Latin America
policymakers of the Bush administration: the ideological
extremists Roger Noriega at the State Department and
Otto Reich at the White House. Both Noriega and Reich
are actively involved in a PR blitz accusing both Fidel
and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of a plot to
destabilize Latin America - something that always
provokes interminable rounds of roaring laughter in
Latin American diplomatic circles.
Here's a
flagrant case of flip-flopping. In 2000 Kerry said the
embargo was a product only of the "politics of Florida",
and should be reconsidered. But now, as far as El
Comandante is concerned, Kerry favors the embargo. Even
conservative Republicans in agricultural states are
against it. When asked whether he would consider lifting
the embargo, Kerry said, "Not unilaterally, not now,
no." The problem is that the lifting of the embargo
would be unilateral, because no other country in the
world bothers to follow it. Why did Kerry change his
mind? Because he met a group of top, powerful
Cuban-Americans in Miami late last year.
Before
his presidential campaign, when he was on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry was in favor of a
more rational and much more principled US policy for
Latin America. The whole problem amounts to the fact
that Kerry still does not know how to position himself
to capture both the Cuban-American vote and the
Democratic progressive vote.
Asia Times Online
has learned the Kerry campaign's Tony Montana-style
paranoia centers on one fact: by all means, do
everything to prevent something like Al Gore's Palm
Beach County election disaster in 2000. The bright side
is a series of polls according to which only 60 percent
of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade and Broward counties
are planning to vote for Bush, and the number may even
be falling by the day with the scandals piling up.
The Kerry campaign strategy to capture the 40
percent of remaining voters, if not more, would be
something like the first Clinton campaign against George
Bush Sr: Clinton accused Bush of being soft on Havana;
he bashed Fidel; and he bashed every government that had
good relations with Cuba. This explains Kerry accusing
Hugo Chavez of being anti-democratic and also a
supporter of narco-terrorism in Colombia (no evidence
anywhere supports this outlandish charge). In a
sublimely ironic twist of fate, Chavez supports Kerry
for president, as well as virtually any democratically
elected Latin American leader.
Kerry - not to
mention the Bush administration itself - obviously does
not understand the extremely complex populist
nationalism practiced by Chavez. Nor does he understand
the basic deal in the relationship between Chavez and
Fidel: Chavez provides subsidized oil deliveries to
Cuba, and Fidel provides thousands of urgently needed
doctors and technicians to Venezuela. The Kerry rhetoric
is only concerned with capturing votes on Ground Zero.
Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, stresses: "There has
been an increasingly vocal constituency within the
Democratic Party - including labor, students, farm
interests, multinational businesses and minorities -
that has been advocating the adoption of a Latin America
policy that is less belligerent, more balanced, and
reflective of greater sensitivity to the region's
yearning for authentic democratization as well as its
other political and economic aspirations, including
addressing the issues of social justice throughout the
region."
To sum it all up: if Kerry does not get
his act together, Ralph Nader - not Bush - will outflank
him and steal all these precious hundreds of thousands
of Florida votes. Ground Zero, indeed.
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Cuba libre
